


we are alive; that is enough

by stillmadaboutpetra



Series: be the thing that buries me [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Bittersweet, Boys In Love, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Comrades in Arms, Love, Pre-Canon, Protective Eskel (The Witcher), Soft Eskel (The Witcher), Soft Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Witchers Have Feelings (The Witcher)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:28:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25842106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: It is the last summer that they will ever have edged in the gold of boyhood; it is the last summer Geralt’s hair curls at his ears in loose autumnal waves. It is the last summer Eskel can lay his hands freely on Geralt like a promise; but they don't know that. For now, it is enough that they are alive; that is joy enough to slow the wilt of the sun across the sky.
Relationships: Eskel/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Series: be the thing that buries me [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1882180
Comments: 32
Kudos: 104





	we are alive; that is enough

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fayet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fayet/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Hibernating with Ghosts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23119000) by [Fayet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fayet/pseuds/Fayet). 



> you do not need to have read hibernating with ghosts to read this. it's set between the first trial and geralt's second trial 
> 
> This is, perhaps, part of a loose arc we have together. half of this is me just sending love letters at fayet's coal heart

It’s almost like running away.

But there are no horses. Their provisions are too light. There’s too much glee and not enough fear. It’s not running away but towards. The mountain bloats ahead of them, a monstrous body to climb and conquer. The sight of it sets their teeth, settles their bones.

They leave before the sun rises, for even as they’ve settled into their new senses, a high-noon sun makes their eyes pulse with an ache that slowly swarms into their head as bees making hive. In the gloaming mist of a summer dawn, they depart from the keep, thinking of Wargs and of swallowtails and of kingdoms come; they ache in the false second puberty of their transmutation, not clumsy but still stretching to fill what they’ve been given; what they survived.

When their path twists down, they fall their weight and run, rush, skidding stones. Geralt leaps ahead, a childish whoop breaking from his chest; his teeth glint in the low pink stretch of morning, his mouth all red with blood that’s not there. Eskel kicks forward, gravity on his back, racing after Geralt and reaching out to snatch at his curls - but they dance from his grip, a laugh lost in the wind.

They catch on the green newness of tree limbs, the whip of saplings on their faces so similar to the lashes on their backs - scars healed to thread-thin memories. Eskel can no longer remember half the punishments he earned.

Geralt disappears into the forest, nothing but a break of sound ahead of Eskel, his hellbent reckless flight thinning to thunder in the valley. Eskel thinks of calling out to him - first, to say, _slow for me, brother!_ \- but when he opens his mouth, lungs rushing full of flight, he knows he would cry out instead - do not stop. _Run for me, brother!_

They leave behind the graves that now grow grass; he thinks Vesemir seeded the soil, so velveted in growth that it’s easy to slide one's eyes over the bulges of dead boys that will not grow up. Melitele, do they run.

They run until Eskel’s heart lobs into his throat, the ground giving to more stone than soil, the free-fall of their descent now a labouring rise. Geralt’s standing atop an impressive jut of stone, gently heaving for breath, waiting with an unimpressed firmness that mirrors Vesemir's grand and dismissive disappointment.

“You’re slow. You’ll die on the Path like that.”

“You’ve got burrs in your hair.”

Geralt reaches up, finding yes, he’s crowned in thorny plum burls. Naturally, he throws them at Eskel as Eskel lifts himself by narrow finger and footholds to stand beside Geralt. In tandem, they look up the face of the mountain, a faded monolith against the paling sky.

“Shall we race?” Geralt offers the idea, trying for dignity even as he itches to let loose the same way he did in their rush towards the mountain’s base. “Or will two defeats in a row wound you more deeply than I can mend?”

“If you promise to treat my wounds very kindly, I am willing to race.”

“I will be kind.”

“Very kind?”

Geralt tears his eyes from the peak to Eskel; the morning dawns in his face. “The kindest I can be, Eskel.”

Eskel claps Geralt on the shoulder, grinning to him. “How noble you are, brother!” And then with all his greater strength, shoves Geralt from his perch on the rock. He doesn’t wait to hear Geralt’s landing, knowing that Geralt will hit the ground cleanly on all fours as a cat, a creepy crawly Witcher. Instead, he launches himself onto the side of the mountain, hoping to climb as well as the narrow-hooved goats, climbing it faster than the cresting sun.

“Shit heel!”

Eskel laughs at the outrage below him and the resounding scrabble of boots on loose rocks as Geralt restarts his climb anew from the very bottom of the mountain.

Even though the day is one closer to playful than the tax of training, they’ve set their goal high. All in boyhood they’d looked at the peaks of the Blue Mountains and thought impossible thoughts of ascension. Older Witchers, Witchers long dead, long rotted, long made memory and forgotten again had climbed these mountains. A silent and deadly breed of wolves. They left outposts, broken down obelisks for pyres and smoke signals should some great horde of dragon or wyvern or flighted beast seek seething vengeance on the world; salamander kings. Half-way fabled nonsense.

The mountain hugs them both in return, the mineral kiss on their hands and faces cool, the core of the mountain still waking from winter’s sleep, spring a slow thing that didn’t rouse any warmth; a season that they missed, entangled in their Trials, in the surety of death and the desperate reach out of it.

Eskel tries and fails to look below himself, to see Geralt’s ascent some feet below. His brother gains on him with every second; spry and strange; being a Witcher suits him. By grace, was he made for it.

Eskel shakes the thought from his head. Made for it? Can one be made best for a remaking? Was Geralt’s boyhood nothing more than raw ore that sat in wait for the pick and plunder; had fever treated him kindly? Was he now a smelted thing, a weapon’d thing?

“Don’t let me catch you, Eskel,” Geralt calls up to him, half lost in the wind that rises as they rise. “For if I do…-” the Mountain steals away his threat.

Eskel climbs upward, listening for Geralt, ,unable to see him, trusting that his brother finds sure handholds and a safe place for the tips of his toes. That he remain strong for the duration of this climb.

One, two? Two hours? It would be days of trekking and climbing and camping to truly find the peak of the highest point - they have all summer to test themselves; but they ascend high enough to their own little summit that the morning’s coolness persists even as the sun finds them, scaling bluely. Eskel does beat Geralt, pulling himself, panting, aching, over the lip of a summit point. He slings off his small pack and flops over onto his back, staring up at the now whited brightness of morning in full glory above him.

Relief washes over him; he weeps with it, struck blind by it. The sun, the sky - as long as no beasts fells him, he will be gifted this for centuries; the simplest of pleasures. The sun, the sky, the wind on his face.

And Geralt, climbing up beside him with a grunt to lay down just as he is, their hands nearly touching, palms bared up nakedly to the world as if begging for stimagata or for a star to plummet to their grasps and burn a hole straight through to the core of all things great and small. There’s no taunting to be had now. They close their eyes, preening as the bright gem of the day ensorsels them each in private reverie, all things gilded, all things aglow. Drifting in waking dream.

Strong. They are strong.

It whoops through Eskel - all the things they might become. He laughs, startling the silence with it; his laughter runs and leaps from the edge of the mountain, bounding and echoing freely. He sits up, a trumpeting of stone. He whoops aloud- barbaric, battle-cry.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Geralt’s sitting up to stare at him, rumpled and annoyed.

“We’re alive.” Eskel grins at him and reaches over to shake Geralt’s shoulder. “We’re alive, Geralt.”

Geralt stares at him and nods very slowly, looking away. “Now what?”

“We live.”

Geralt nods again. “Reasonable enough.”

And when Eskel kneels, Geralt kneels across from him. Their bodies welcome the posture; their joints come to a rest.

The Trials did something to Eskel’s magic; he hums with it constantly. It crackles just beneath his skin, a vibration he can feel, that makes him restless and impatient and too-aware of himself; but it reaches out to the magic in Geralt, that quieter weaker thing nested too deeply in his heart. But like this, when Geralt goes under the lulling peace of meditation, when he lays himself naked in his own mind to travel through his body as if he will acknowledge every cell of his own skin, ever pulse of his heart, Eskel yawns towards him, seeking, trying to coax Geralt to the same note that sings alive inside him. That they might feel each other, fingertip to fingertip, breath for breath; they might drift to the same low roar of throbbing energy that currents through all things living and all things matter.

When, as one, they rise out of their tranquility, the sun’s hot on their faces. Geralt’s curls are aflame with it. Prompted at the sight, Eskel pats the top of his own head, confirming the heat on his scalp.

“Here.” Geralt offers him a waterskin. They take a moment, refreshing, before climbing to their feet to peer over the edge of the drop.

“I don’t look forward to climbing down.”

“There is an easier pass. When I told Vesemir our design for the day, he said there is one.” Eskel gestures off around a bend of rock; they hadn’t chosen their ascension point blindly. Geralt nods.

They explore leisurely, pausing to collect the nettled seeds of mountain rod and the dry plumage of heather and lavender. Eskel holds the herb bag, enjoying the perfume that clings around him. Up ahead, Geralt’s stopped, head tipped curiously.

“What is it?”

“Hmm.”

And off he goes without a word. Eskel follows without a word.

They find the cave of white crabs together, following their noses like proud bloodhounds. The smell of water makes their mouths run; the sun beats on their necks, tangles hot fingers in their hair.

It is the last summer that they will ever have edged in the gold of boyhood; it is the last summer Geralt’s hair curls at his ears in loose autumnal waves. It is the last summer Eskel can lay his hands freely on Geralt like a promise; but they don't know that. For now, it is enough that they are alive; that is joy enough to slow the wilt of the sun across the sky.

Geralt, feathered in pride, slips into the water first; he looks over his naked shoulder at Eskel, a dare flirting in the corner of his mouth.

“The sand is soft.” He tilts his head, listening to the echo of his own voice in the chamber of the cave. He breathes in, listening to that too - the freedom of his lungs; Eskel’s heart double-times in his ear, once from blood, once from stones cast back to him. “The water is cool.”

Eskel can see through the stark water; Geralt wiggles his toes into the lap of silt; the finely milled mineral, the near-luminous moss. Geralt skims his foot along it, currying a cloud, weighted dust that drifts, tugging the hair of his ankle and his toes. The crabs, milling and pontificating in spectatorship, snip at the gifted motes, crawling over each other in eager hunger. They skitter towards Gerlat’s offered feet, then back again when he wiggles his toes at them.

Eskel drifts towards the edge of the lake, bare feet sinking into the water. He reaches out to clasp a hand on Geralt’s shoulder - he cannot pretend to need him for balance, but it feels like that anyway.

“Oh, brave,” Geralt murmurs to the lake, shaking his foot up out of the water. A tiny crab clings to the horn on his big toe.

“A bold one,” Eskel huffs approvingly. Geralt shakes his foot again and sends the creature flying, plopping into the water like a fat raindrop. “It’ll be your balls next.”

Geralt hums, looking down into the water, swishing forward with a cut of ripples. For now, the water goes no higher than to lick over his talus, barely anointing him. Barely casting a silver skin over him. “I hope not. Only got the two balls.”

“And ten toes, yes, very good. I see you did learn how to count between swinging your sword.”

Geralt snorts and looks at Eskel’s hand on his shoulder - ah, he’d left it there, had he?

“You enjoy when I swing my sword.”

“It’s a fine sword.”

Geralt looks down at his body - touches slowly the dip of his adonis belt, tracking the cut of his hips like he’s his own lover. Eskel has loved his body, but not this one, not this changed one. “I’m surprised they let us keep them.”

The statement startles Eskel, sends a flash of fear down his spine; he recoils on instinct. His hand on Geralt’s shoulder withdraws until barely his fingertips skim the bone and muscle of this changed body that he has not yet loved.

“Any of it,” Geralt continues in a quieter voice. Bitterness clips his tongue. He takes his cock into his hand, holding it distantly in his palm. It flops back down, soft and vulnerable to cover his balls. These he cups his hand over. “Why not geld us as a horse?”

On a whim or a burn of instinct, Eskel runs his fingers across the wings of Geralt’s shoulder blades and swiftly down his spine; whether he means to or not, he knows he’s crackling with magic, winces with its bite in his teeth,; Geralt arches with the featherlight touch, the magic skimming his skin like the tip of a blade. A whisper of pain that dances the line of potential.

“Are we to be denied even simple pleasures?” His hand fits the curve of Geralt’s hip. They did not change that, how Eskel’s hand fits over him as if Geralt grew into the shape of his touch,; Eskel grips him securely, fingers curled around the sharp edge of him, the gawkiness of his last growth spurt still remnant in the coltish length of his limbs. He knows that Geralt is stronger than he looks or feels; he walked out of his first trial; Eskel had not. “We would go mad without pleasure, Geralt.”

“So anytime I’ve thought all those old coots mad, I really mean to say they ought to go fuck themselves?” Geralt ducks his head with the words, shying away from a different thought. But it leaves the nape of his neck bare to Eskel who is already mad enough as it is. His stomach drops out in hunger.

“Yes.” He kisses the knob of Geralt’s spine and relishes the inhale he earns in response.

“Do you need to go fuck yourself?” Geralt asks, staring down at the water, at his feet, at the reflection that shapeshifts with the strange tide of crabs that run amok all around them.

“No.”

Geralt hums, tilting his head to the side for Eskel to skim his nose along his neck, tracking a vein, the sluggish pulse of blood that beats in Witcher-time. “The lake looks deeper ahead. Can you smell it?”

It’s prompt enough to have Eskel lift his head from the better curiosity of Geralt to cast an investigative eye towards the darkness that stretches beyond them. The crabs thin in the distance, scooting around an invisible line - a drop off of depth that must plummet. They can smell the mountain in the water, the soil that’s been carried in the currents, the green of vegeative debris and sunlight gone mute in the dark. But there too is a stone and salt smell, a murky fungal depth in the water.

“Yes.” Eskel wonders at it, lifting his face into the air. Again, joy fills him; the novelty of smelling water. He digs his feet into the silt beneath him, relishing the little cut of a shell that his weight crushes to softness.

Geralt, a little too willing to approach the dark thing in the corner, wades through the shallow water, their aquatic friends parting around him as wheatgrass does from a scythe.

“Race you to the bottom?”

Eskel stares into the inky blackness from over his shoulder. “These mountains are old, Geralt; some secrets are better left sleeping.”

“Like dogs,” he nods.

Eskel’s a fool to think Geralt ever listens to him. He has too much of the idiotic pride and bravado that Witchers cloak themselves in as safeguards against all the things they lack.

Without warning, Geralt shoves from the shallow lip of land and dives into the narrow black drop they can just make out.

The lake gulps him down.

In the low-light, Geralt vanishes from him; a fade of his thighs and feet as he descends into that black unknown. Air bubbles break the surface and dissolve with ripples that don’t make it to Eskel’s legs before the water goes still. Eskel hovers, feet curled over the edge of that sheer-faced drop, a current of cold and warm water breaking gently around him, unseen but felt, like a ghost.

He prickles in the lonesomeness of the cave, left with the crabs and his heartbeat only, Geralt’s absence too sudden, the lake too still. He’d barely disturbed the water with his foolish dive. The crabs scurry to the edge, small phantoms tumbling to and fro as the underwater current rocks them; some leap into the temperature front, buoying in the water, small organs fluttering - Eskel does not know their anatomy, but they swim and jet about before returning to the shallow rock to tarry at his side.

Just when Eskel takes a breath to dive after him, Geralt appears, murky and then all at once, cresting the water with a gasp. Eskel smells the blood; it’s too dark to see it but it’s a hammerstrike against his senses.

“Geralt!”

Eskel leans over to pull at him and gets a spitting jet of water into his face; Geralt’s mouth gleams with laughter.

“Worried you?”

Eskel splashes his face. “Only that I’ll get the flat of Vesemir’s sword on my ass if I have to haul your drowned body back down this mountain.”

Geralt hums, seeing through his lie. He climbs out of the water; his hands and arms and shoulders are scratched.

“There’s a tunnel but it grew too narrow. Almost got stuck.”

“You’re an idiot. If you’d gone through, you’d only drown.”

“Maybe.”

Eskel jabs him meanly in the neck. Geralt coughs, hand flying up to cover the spot from a second attack. “They did not give you gills, you imbecile. Don’t waste your breath so foolishly.”

Geralt shoves him off the lip of the rock; Eskel drops into the water heavily, his bones newly heavy. He has to surge upwards before he dips too far into that lightless pitch. When he breaks the surface, Geralt’s on the far side of the lake, hand aloft.

“You-”

Geralt throws a spray of tiny crabs at him. They plink and plonk against his chest and catch in his hair.

“Geralt! You fuck.”

“There are your cave monsters, Eskel - quick, a crown for every crab defeated! Bring me their heads.”

They scuffle, pushing each other through the water, back onto the damp stone beyond the shallow lake. They tangled nakedly, no fists or kicks, but knees and elbows - teeth snatching for the other’s neck.

Eskel mounts Geralt, pinning him belly down on the stone. He does no more than a single pointed hump to the sweet cleave of Geralt's ass. “You will be my first kill.”

“How will you do it?” Geralt strains to rise up, but Eskel is bigger and stronger than him. He knees the base of Geralt’s spine.

“My silver, right to your heart.”

“What beast am I?”

“An ugly crab.” Eskel rolls him over to sit on his hips. Geralt arches, lifting him a little before settling with the weight of Eskel astride him. He runs his hands up Eskel’s naked thighs to trace circles and stars on his hips and buttocks. “Look what you’ve done to yourself.”

Geralt smiles with lazy pride and indulgence as Eskel traces his brow bone and the aquiline slope of his nose, down to his shapely mouth. “What have I done, dear Eskel?”

“Scratched your face trying to drown yourself. What an embarrassment to Wolves everywhere.”

“Hmm.” Geralt fingers the cut on his nose; he’d turned his face into a rock in the blind dark down there. Embarrassment indeed.

Eskel holds his cheek, looking him over. He really could have drowned if he’d been just small enough to slip through some unknown tunnel. There’s training to be done for the length of time they can hold their breaths. They will meditate under the water; they will lay on their backs with stones on their chests and be made not to drown; monsters will drag them beneath the surface one day, and they will fight in full armor without breath.

Eskel strokes his thumb over Geralt's cheekbone, eyes tracking the contours of his face. Every Witcher they know has scars on their face; it’s so bare in combat. They could never stifle their senses with a helmet.

“What are you thinking?” Geralt asks quietly.

“I am imagining what heartless monster will one day scar your face.”

Geralt closes his eyes in embarrassment. “You’re a fop.”

“You are beautiful.”

Geralt shivers with the praise. His eyes flutter open and he reaches up to mirror Eskel’s gesture. “You will win a hundred hearts a day, brother. The most handsome wolf to ever prowl the Path.”

“They made you a poet not a Witcher.”

Geralt drops his hand. “They did not make you less of an asshole.”

“We will be a poet and an asshole together.”

Geralt twitches under the kiss Eskel lays on his mouth.

Eskel falters, lifting from his conquest. Water drips from the stalactites, pattering onto stone and lake alike. “What is it?”

Geralt runs a finger over Eskel’s ankle, stroking the relaxed tendon. “We will be apart next spring.”

They have not parted since Eskel returned from Ban Ard. They had forgotten each other in the years of separation, children passing from friend to friend until they found each other again.

“What’s to stop us from doing otherwise.” Eskel puffs his chest out. “I would fight at your side and guard your back, as I always have.”

“That’s not how it’s done,” Geralt protests, turning his face away.

“We will do it anyway.” Eskel turns Geralt’s face back to him, holding the still sharpening line of his jaw. “I would walk the Path with you all my days, Geralt.”

Geralt searches his face; the blur of the crybaby boy he’d been rises up in the strife plain on his expression. An abandoned pup brought in by Vesemir.

“It’s never been done.”

Eskel wonders if he’s protesting for the sake of protesting.

“We shall be the first of our kind.”

Geralt’s lips twitch, his troublesome smirk. “Yes, and the first winter we return, they’ll beat us for breaking that lonely rule.”

“Oh, we can give them something better than that to warrant a whipping. Involve ourselves in royal politics! Find a way to whelp a pup of our own.”

Geralt pulls a face. “They did not give me gills nor a cunt to bear your hideous whelps.”

“Promise me you’ll try all the same,” Eskel teases, making a show of pinching Geralt’s cheek. He gets slapped and rolled over onto his back. Geralt bites his neck in annoyance.

“I'll try,” Geralt whispers into his neck.

“To grow a cunt for me?”

Geralt digs his nose into Eskel’s hair. “To walk the Path with you as often as possible.”

Eskel’s heart catches into his throat. He wraps an arm around Geralt, crushing them together. “Promise it.”

“I promise it.”

In a week, they return to the cave, this time with a metal pot and a bag of salt with which they boil the crabs, eating the butter morsels with their fingers, legs dangling over the sheer plummet of the mountain. Their campfire gives off only a thin plume of smoke, no great pyre of warning or war.

“Geralt!”

The clanging of metal swords and wooden trainers alike necessitates the shout; and though only one name comes from Vesemir’s lips, the entire courtyard stalls with aborted life.

The young Witcher in question freezes in his playful skirmish, sword aloft, the arc of his arabesque stroke struck dead at its highest peak. The clouds of sunhot dust settles around the sudden loss of his jigging footwork. Geralt tilts his head obediently to his name, first finding Vesemir with his ears as his head turns; the upright direction of his nose and flair of his nostrils his next sense - a twitch of worry in his brow as his eyes settle on not his mentor but the mages that flank the old Witcher.

Even the boys who have yet to face their trials shuffle on newly-nervous feet at the sight of the zealots. Eskel’s lip curls back from his teeth, a cornered fear running feral through him.

“Hand off your sword, boy.”

The whole courtyard of boys swells with a sudden held breath. Geralt blinks once, eyes darting between Vesemir and the shrewish mages; conjured in his mind, as it is in Eskel’s, are the flickering nightmares of seeing those faces amidst fever and pain, flayed open under the unweaving of chaos and the force of decoction burning bitterly down their throats, fighting to swallow against the upsurge of vomit; opening ones eyes to see their flesh unsewn, their organs in hands - weather madness or truth they’ll never know--scalpels in their eyes and venom stinging -

Geralt flips his blade down cleanly, turning the hilt in a deft twist of the hand until the point jousts perpendicular to the earth; he holds it out to Eskel impassively.

Eskel does not lower his sword. He tightens his grip on the hilt, knees still bent in the lunge he would have parried Geralt’s next stroke with, weight still ready to spring.

“Hold this for me, brother,” Geralt entreats, soft and mild. He tilts his head again, this time the barest duck of his chin to Eskel.

Eskel stares at the offered sword. “You offer that too freely,” Eskel whispers, hysteria slowly mounting him, climbed up from the pit of his stomach where instinct sickens and swims.

“Take his sword, Eskel,” Vesemir orders sharply.

Eskel’s lip curls back over his teeth. “No.”

“Eskel,” Geralt whispers, shocked or pleading, it’s unclear, at the same time Vesemir grimly snaps “Eskel,” and together the canon of his name tangles with regret from both Witchers. If he listens hard enough, he could hear all the boys’ racing hearts in the courtyard - do they not see the faces no longer beside Geralt and Eskel? Only they walked this summer, only they two; and terror takes him to think, what if the winter greets only one?

Eskel takes Geralt by the wrist, squeezing him, stepping into his space. Geralt’s smells of sweat and dust and iron-blood. “Whatever they say--”

“You worry too much,” Geralt cuts him off, twisting out of Eskel’s grip if only to squeeze his hand before dropping it. But he does not meet Eskel’s eyes, gaze already shuttered and averted, knowing well the ease at which Eskel would read the fear behind his mask.

No Witcher does not fear those zealots. Especially not one who still sweats in his nightclothes with nightmares only recently survived.

“Hold this for me until I’m back,” Geralt says once more, abandoning the sword swiftly into Eskel’s hand and withdrawing, forcing him to take the weight of steel or have it drop to the dirt in disgrace.

Geralt looks over his shoulder only once, face flushed with training and life, sunlight catching gold and ruby in the russet curls framing his face; the breeze that made the dogged summer heat barely manageable lifts them to feather and flight about his face, obscuring his expression to all save Eskel who stands at the ready at his back, mouth hanging open on the begging words he will wish he had cried that day.

Then Geralt turns his back to Eskel and the rest of the would-be Witchers and follows the path into the keep.


End file.
